Happy Black Friday everyone.  If you’re like me, then you’ll be doing a lot of your holiday shopping online this year.  My favorite way to look for deals is actually to go walk around Best Buy or REI with a coffee, pick out what I want, and then go and find it for cheaper on the internet.  Hopefully soon I’ll be able to scan barcodes with my Android phone, see prices instantly and do a one-click order to have whatever it is sent to my house.

In the meantime though I use Ebay quite a lot, even as it continues to loose ground against Amazon (which I also use a lot). This Ebay gadget is labled as the “official” one, and lets you link your Ebay account to the gadget in a very official way (see screenshots). Once you’ve got it linked, you can use its very mediocre version of search (I don’t recommend it), or more importantly, you can use the gadget to monitor all your watched, bidded and won items from inside iGoogle. This is akin to using the Gmail gadget to preview your inbox. Instead of keeping Ebay open all day, you can use iGoogle instead, and hopefully check a few other things (like your stocks) all at the same time. This gadget could definitely stand to be improved.  First, it’s slow to load for no apparent reason.  Second, since the gadget is really about monitoring things you’ve done on Ebay.com, it would be great if it included richer monitoring options inline, like the ability to turn on SMS or email alerts.  Lastly, this gadget would be a good candidate for a canvas view that improves its horrible search function.  Also, what is the deal with the horizontal scroll bar in dashboard view?  The UI designer must have been asleep on that one.  Despite lots of searching, I wasn’t able to track down an official Amazon gadget, so Ebay has a leg up there. Happy bidding!